Iranian mourners carried caskets yesterday at a funeral for victims of a US airstrike said to have struck a wedding party, and Tehran launched missiles and drones overnight at a US base in Kuwait, after the war's biggest escalation in more than a month.
Mourners assembled in the late afternoon outside the village of Kuhestak in Sirik County, along a stretch of the coast of the Strait of Hormuz that was hit by heavy US airstrikes late on Tuesday.
Iranian officials say four people died and nearly 70 were wounded by a strike that hit a home during a wedding. State TV reported yesterday that a fifth person, a 22-year-old woman, had since died in hospital.
The US military said it was aware of the Iranian reports but that it "never targets civilians".
US Vice President JD Vancesaid the US is investigating the airstrike.
"We're investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know," Vance told reporters during a White House press briefing.
"If we do make mistakes, again, this is a big difference between us and Iran, when our military makes mistakes, they learn from them to try to get better from them," Vance added.
"This is the body of Martyr Amir-Mohammad Karimi, a 4-year-old child who war martyred in an attack on the country’s south by the criminal American regime," a reporter from Iran's Mehr news agency said in footage filmed in front of a pickup truck carrying a flag-draped coffin beneath a canopy of palm fronds.
In other footage of the funeral, mourners threw petals into the air as doleful music played from a loudspeaker. A casket was carried past a row of soldiers standing at attention with rifles.
"If it was a military location, it wouldn’t be so painful. This was a wedding ceremony, but they turned people's joy into mourning," the semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted a local man as saying.
Washington launched the airstrikes on Tuesday, hitting what it said were military targets along the coast in retaliation for Iranian attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
The sudden escalation of the Iran war has caused a surge in oil prices to levels unseen since July. Price rose for a fourth straight day yesterday, taking Brent crude futures over $96 a barrel.
Iran reported 18 dead in the last US assault, including the four killed at the wedding. It responded on Wednesday to the US strikes with attacks on US bases in Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, and carried out further attacks early yesterday, saying it was targeting another US base, in Kuwait.
Kuwait's military said its air defences had intercepted missiles and drones. But following that, the war's biggest flareup since July appeared to subside, with no more major attacks from either side reported as the day wore on.